Knights Accused of Match Fixing in Lima Major

In the midst of the Lima Major 2023, Chinese Dota 2 team Knights has been accused of match fixing after having already faced such allegations in the past. After Knights' matchup versus Geek Slate and Entity in the Major had quite peculiar odds, discussions regarding the alleged match fixing erupted on social platforms such as Reddit. The team was ahead in networth in game one of the series but the odds heavily favored Geek Slate to win, and as Geek went on to emerge victorious, this prompted suspicions. A similar occurrence was observed during the series versus Entity.

Knights has been under fire for alleged map hacking and match fixing for the past few months from the Dota 2 community. As of writing, Knights has yet to secure a victory at the Lima Major.

Knights gets called out for alleged match fixing

While Knights has demonstrated a good performance over the past few months, the team has consistently had its activities called out for being suspicious.

The latest accusation stems from the team's series with Geek Slate and Entity at Lima Major 2023. In addition to the chances highly favoring a Knights defeat despite being 5k up in the game against Geek, the odds of the total number of kills being an odd number were also surprisingly high against Entity.

This was perplexing because the odd against even ratio is normally quite close due to it being a very unpredictable outcome. Eventually, the first game of the series saw 48:17 kills, and the second saw 25:10 kills, resulting in an odd number of kills.

Having expressed concerns about possible shady practices in the games of Knights, Dota 2 caster Oleksii "BafiK" Bafadarov took to Twitter, tagging Valve and Epulze, the organizer of the Lima Major, to investigate.

Ever since Knights was originally accused of being involved in map hacking during the first few series of the Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) 2023 Tour 1, there has been an increasing amount of backlash directed at them.

Perfect World, the organizer of the Chinese DPC competition, was reportedly said to have gathered proof of newly formed side Knights employing the suspected vision hacks. It had also submitted them to Valve for further examination.

While this did not develop further, Knights being accused of unethical behavior became a recurring theme. Its match versus EHOME in the later half of Tour 1 was also suspected of being rigged, with prominent Ukrainian caster Vitalii Mykolayovych "v1lat" Volochai tweeting about the unusual odds.

After a very strong set of results in Tour 1, Knights is yet to win in the Lima Major 2023. The club has appeared far inferior to its opponents, losing seven games in a row.

While there have been several complaints, it remains to be seen if they are accurate and if Valve will take serious action. At the same time, in recent months Valve has been fairly aggressive in permanently and temporarily banning players from pro Dota 2 for their involvement in match fixing and account sharing.